#library solutions

[sleepyminty]

Absolutely losing it that we are now able to be an absolute dick to abnomalities in the new mirror dungeon

Except for lost passenger

[ththghts]

03.12.25 // a peaceful morning study session at an old library of arts and music…

i happened to stumble upon a small, privately-owned library while looking for parking on my way to picking up a pre-lecture coffee. i felt inexplicably drawn to the place from its exterior alone, and when i noticed they were selling books out front, i was completely convinced to go and browse.

i was soon exploring the place, eventually finding a corner where i could tuck myself away and begin studying. it’s such a gorgeous library, with such an unparalleled sense of peace brought about just by soaking in the environment there; i’ll definitely be returning.

🎧 | some classical music i listened to that morning

[july-19th-club]

i have no mouth and i must scream speech but for about insomnia hate hate hate let me tell you how much i have come to hate being awake

[longsightmyth]

Posts that talk about how book piracy isn't okay because libraries exist miss the point I feel

Even if libraries didn't exist, or you don't have access to one, the way pay is set up for authors means pirating a book does actually DIRECTLY affect their income.

"Isn't it better for people to read their books and talk about them if they can't pay for them"

Well, no. Or we would not have had such a movement on here about how publicity for artists isn't the same as pay.

Pay artists for their art, or don't get their art. This only seems to be a difficult concept for tumblr (especially but not exclusively) when the art in question is writing.

[inkyrainstorms]

Alright bestie, buckle the fuck in cause I got some Martian Stan AU stuff we need to figure out.

(Also your latest writing piece is just??? Impeccable. Imagine me gripping the sides of my screen like a crazed circus monkey, its so good)

Here's the problem with the Martian Stan Au.

How the hell is Stan supposed to survive on the other end of the portal,

WITHOUT. This Au being a reverse portal Au

We all know how those go, Stan starts dimension hopping and surviving that way, like a crazy space pirate.

But if this is to STAY a Martian Au, that means Stan needs to retain some Mark Watney type traits. Mainly, Staying in one space, making notes (or in this case, audio logs) about his experiences, and making the nightmare realm fear his botany powers.

Now why the hell would Stanley Pines, a grifter conman extraordinaire know anything about Botany, or growing anything?

This is where I need you to hear me out.

What was a popular, elicit and illegal crop, grown both in the United states and in South America in the 1970s? What could Stan have been growing that gave him experience with botany and crop growing in general?

I am suggesting the idea, that Stan grew weed, and THAT is why he can survive via botany powers in the nightmare realm.

I've been staring at my ceiling unblinking for an hour trying to figure out a different way Stan could have all of the knowledge necessary to create, harvast, and maintain a large scale crop production site for. However long until Ford can get the portal up and running

(In the book The Martian i think Watney was on Mars for like? A little over a year?)

PLEASE tell me if you have any other ideas other than Stan being a weed farmer as a part of his criminal past. I don't know how else to give him knowledge about growing things that fit in his character

Peace and love! <3

After thinking about it for a good couple minutes, honestly i think you’re right. Stan could definitely have been involved in something of that nature for a while. to be fair though, he also probably picked up a lot of random skills on the road (not enough to grow a whole farm with alien crops, but enough for a base, maybe) (between odd jobs, like weed farm and maybe even regular farm for a while, and the couple of Stansco products that were farm related (thinking about the pitchforks) he’d have a decent-ish base to start)

i’m ngl, i’d been thinking about it in a slightly different direction though! I love playing with the effects of the Nightmare Realm on human beings (I actually came up with a whole au where Ford was stuck in the Nightmare Realm for several years and developed static powers as a defense mechanism) (oh my gosh no i’m not gonna rant about that right now we’ll be here all day) (i should make a separate post at some point though, now that i think about it) (Nightmare!Ford from the Came Back Wrong au my beloved) (he’s got so many problems)

ahem. i got off topic. anyway! I kind of figured that, since time is probably incredibly odd in a realm that is literally falling apart at the seams, maybe Stan’s bodily systems also work differently, at a different pace or something along those lines.

(it’d also let there be a scene post-rescue where Ford is obsessively doing medics tests on Stan and finds out he’s like. months younger than he should be, even though it felt like time passed ‘the same’ for them) (like real life astronauts). So he wouldn’t have to eat that often! So then, he could stretch out the perishables he finds at the refugee camp for longer, and then he has more time to figure things out farming!

[lylahammar]

desperately need more fat video essayists to cover topics about fatness, fatphobia, and diet culture. I'm watchin this skinny girl in this video essay replace the word "fat" with "F" in every quote she reads like it's a slur because she looked up what the least problematic term for fatness was and the article she found put "fat" at the same level as "obese"

[binah-beloved]

busy. you and Binah simultaneously doing paperwork while you're sitting comfortably in her lap.

at some point the work will stop in favor of cuddles. do not resist.

[iridikron]

found this suspicious blue square poking around the website.

text reads: Don't you pity me. All you ever wanted to do was sabatoge me and now you get to have my friends and get away scott free. It's not my fault. It can't be my fault. I'm the victim here you are all just too self absorbed to see.

there was a text box with some instructions, but after messing around with it a bit i wasn't sure if i was doing what was intended or if i was able to follow them exactly in the software i use, but i could faintly make out what looked to be wingdings hidden in the original image and messed with layer filters until they revealed themselves. after that it was just finding a key for the wingdings font and manually transliterating it all :)

[isfjmel-phleg]

Major leak in the library ceiling? We'll bring in a bigger trash can to catch the drips, set up a fan for the giant patch of wet carpet, and leave before you can ask us to put up plastic to cover the nearby shelves. No, we don't have plastic sheeting. Problem solved. Another day saved. Good luck with the constant rain/snow we're supposed to get this weekend.

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.

[vonlipvig]

always without fail. shut up.

[gelarshiesprofruitboarder]

i did tge thing in the top left yesterday and now theres all of this

[skitskatdacat63]

Thank you so much for the tag @rubyreadd here are nine books I'd like to read this year

Icl basically half of these are sitting on my desk already, waiting for me to read 😭 but anyways as you can probably tell: I'm a huge nerd. Tbf anytime I hear about smth new historically, I instantly want to pick up a book about it, but then forget, so here are the ones I do actually remember lol

I'm not exactly sure who to tag but I shall say hmm @chaotic-history @beechicory @foxantoine and anyone else who'd like to do it!

[ihavevisions]

Shoutout to Nuru who’s been having prophetic dreams for so long she can’t differentiate a dream from a vision and has spent quite sometime thinking she’ll doom her people because of a nightmare

[would-they-distort]

Zexion/Ienzo from Kingdom Hearts?

(Ienzo will be posting later!)

[talkorsomething]

I think part of my problem with interviews isn't necessarily an interview specific problem, it's just a general communication problem. It's like..

Hmmm.

So, i think mostly in words (head is not normally empty) and some images for spice. So sometimes i've got that running in the background. I think about what i'm going to say before i say it*.

When somebody asks me a question (that i don't know how to answer/wasnt expecting maybe?/etc) everything shuts off. & i try to put the words together in the right order to respond, but then it's been quiet for longer than normal, and i can't finish what i was trying to say in my head the right way anyways. That's if i even *have* an answer. Sometimes it's just question -> internet dialup noise -> no thoughts.

I have a small doodle to try and illustrate it, if it helps makes sense:

*not always, sometimes i'm talking & i'm not thinking about anything at all LMAO. Sometimes then i will say something and the moment it leaves my mouth i have no idea what it was.

Anyways, does anyone else get this? Is it related to being autistic or just a normal person thing or is there something else wrong with me? (Haha.)